League Page

It's July 3rd, and we've decided that today is the day to send out a Beta Invite to the users that requested to be kept in the loop when we had new features (due to the long 4th of July weekend).

We also want to give people a look at the first feature that we identified from our May 1st survey: Newsletter Builder.

Next up:

• Allow users to register their own leagues.
• Allow users to sync their data from ESPN FF.

We're targeting first week of September.

Lots of work to do between now and then, see you soon.

👋

It's June 16th, and we're right on track having just finished up the three main embeds for the usable demo we will share to early adopters end of the month:

• Power Rankings
• Matchup Highlight
• Player Highlight

We have a data model in place, and syncing ESPN leagues through AWS Lambda (though we will only do a default league for the purposes of the usable demo.

Additionally, we met up in Dallas in early May and determine an official launch date:

September 1, 2019... just in time for drafts.

We have a readonly, functional mockup of what an eventual League.Page will look like.

We hope this will help fill in the blanks for the people that were interested in the tool but couldn't tell the scope of what it would do from the "Dynasty View" release.

We focus mostly on the In-Season aspect of fantasy, and create an example feed of what league members would expect to see when they login to their League.Page in the future.

We also take time to create a survey. We hope users will see the new site and fill out our survey with the new context in mind, this way we can learn what to focus on building next (our roadmap is large).

Release

We email our early adopters and we again post to reddit.

Knowing our users like to gamble, we tell people that if they fill out the survey, they can get Reddit Silver, Gold, or Platinum (depending on a dice roll).

Sidebar: great idea for a site is a way to share random chance rolls like that with others in a way that is quick and verifiable.

Success criteria for this release?

• Learn what to focus on first for a public release.
• Get more early adopters.

How do we do?

The survey goes over well, and we double the amount of early adopters we had.

In addition, the survey does help us to decide what to build next (currently in progress, targeted release May 1st).

See you soon! 👋

We share the "Dynasty View" with reddit's r/FFcommish community looking for feedback and gauging interest from others on whether or not this a tool they would like to use.

The page doesn't work on mobile at all, and we learn this was a pretty big mistake given that most traffic will come from mobile (the comments on our reddit post support this).

Our new strategy going forward will be mobile-first.

Fortunately, we do include a link to add your email to learn about future updates.

Code complete but we have no infrastructure. We need a place to deploy our site and that unfortunately means, we need a domain.

I have a superstition about domains. So many people spend their time not building and instead thinking of names, that it feels like the start of the end of a project, and I don't want this project to end.

Note: posting on here makes me feel that same way ("Shouldn't you be building?"), but I'm hoping this has unexpected returns as so many of my blogger friends have told me it will.

We decide to go with something temporary, and just buy a domain name with the same name as my fantasy league, but the juices are now flowing.

We get introspective, and because our only visualization is the dynasty view (fantasy football has ended at this point), we are in that mindset.

We buy leagueacy.com, a portmanteau of 'legacy' and 'league', but like portmanteau, we realize it's too hard to spell.

No .coms seem any good (and if they do, they are far too expensive) we look at the new .TLDs.

More introspective and future thinking, we realize that this is really going to be the place that everyone in the league comes to, like a league home page.

No way league.page is available...

It is! We buy it ($280, most expensive domain I've bought yet) and start our deployment... come on DNS, come on!

Please don't let this jinx us. 🤞

An old colleague (Product Design) from Netflix (and more importantly a close friend) finds out I'm working on this app from our shared text thread. He asks if I'm working on a league commissioner tool, and I say, 'yes'. He sends me a picture of some mockups he created for the same type of tool.

Separately we have both had a similar idea, and had started working on it, we decided we should schedule a video chat which occurs, December 21st.

During this chat, we decide to work together at least until we can determine if there is interest. If no one is interested, maybe we continue working on other things? If they are interested, we keep going until they aren't.

It's November, I'm off of work (having left Netflix in September), and I'm managing my fantasy league. Each week it takes me about 1-2 hours to craft a League Update with Power Rankings, results, and analysis of the upcoming week for my league.

I know in future years, I won't have as much free time to commission the league like this, but I want to and so do my league members. You could say I have set the bar pretty high.

On a bike ride with a league member, I decide I need a better tool to send these updates in the future.

At the same time, I'm interviewing and am needing to brush up on the technologies these companies I am applying for are using. I decide to use this first version of League.Page as a refresh on the GrandStack.